CNN’s resident data guru says President Donald Trump’s hated “TACO” nickname is gaining popularity.
Short for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” TACO has been increasingly thrown around on Wall Street to describe President Donald Trump’s frequent flip-flops on tariffs and other signature policies.
“[TACO] is actually entering the mainstream culture, and we can see this right here in Google searches,” CNN data expert Harry Enten said, pointing to a graph that showed a “9,900 percent increase on Thursday versus Tuesday” in searches for the term.
For instance, after Trump imposed a 145 percent tariff on Chinese goods on “Liberation Day,” April 2, and China retaliated with 125 percent tariffs of its own, the president walked back the tariffs to 30 percent. He has similarly reduced tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union.
The acronym has also lately been weaponized by Trump’s detractors, with high-ranking Democratic Party figures like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Jon Cooper, a former campaign chair for former President Barack Obama, slinging the term around this week.
Trump is clearly unhappy about it, too.
“That’s a nasty question,” he told a reporter at a White House press briefing on Wednesday after being quizzed about the term. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.”
Nevertheless, it may very well be here to stay if the latest numbers by CNN are anything to go by.
“This to me is quite troubling for Donald Trump because obviously he trades on his name,” Enten said Friday.
“He trades on the idea that he does what he says,” Enten added. “If all of a sudden you’re associated ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’ with Donald Trump, well, that is no bueno.”
